The current transition to gold open access (OA) through the implementation of an author- or
institution-facing charge (an article or book processing charge: APC or BPC) is based upon two
key flawed assumptions that are particularly acute in the humanities disciplines.

The first of these assumptions is that a market will emerge in which rational actors
(researchers) will develop price sensitivity in the selection of their publication venue. This is
the line of the UK government. However, as we see in the market for shoes, for example, various
manufacturers of trainers manage to sell the same essential product, often made by the same
workers from the same material, with wild price differentiation. In other words, in markets that
deal with symbolic capital (prestige or reputation), perceived value is little to do with the
services or goods provided, but instead wholly concerned with the brand that is valued by
one’s peers. To believe that price for the actual service rendered would trump this
perceived brand-value will remain a naïve position while scholarly communication retains its
dual roles in dissemination and assessment.1

The second assumption is that APCs and BPCs are simply a straightforward substitution of the
point of payment to the supply side of the economic system. The problem with this assumption,
though, is that the economics of risk have been inadequately modelled for the proposed APC set-up
in contrast to the current subscription set-up. The most common way of conceiving of the
subscription and sales environment that we have had so far is as one where we are ‘paying
to read’. We buy material so that we have access and we exclude those who don’t pay.
There is another way of thinking about this, however. This model is also one where, as a group,
we all pay a relatively modest amount in order to subsidise the work of publishers. This is
particularly the case in the instance of mission-orientated publishers, like university presses,
who often do not make huge profits and combine subscription revenues from many institutions so
that they can continue to publish work. In other words, subscriptions and sales act as a risk
pool. There may well be problems in conceiving of this as a market – after all, there is
little rationality and a high level of monopoly, as well as the fact that it operates on an
exclusionary model that is antithetical to the dissemination claims of publishers – but it
is a model whereby a large number of institutions bear the cost of publishing
all the material that appears in a journal or in a book list.

The same is not true of article and book processing charges. This new environment may look rosy
for institutions that do not produce much, or any, research. After all, they have no researchers
for whom they have to pay. This is not the case, though, for research-intensive institutions or
for younger institutions with smaller budgets that wish to break into the research-intensive
groupings. In each of these cases, a subscription will work out far cheaper at the local level
than a switch to direct author-facing payments. Indeed, even with offsetting measures in a hybrid
environment that are designed to make this a transition, the costs are located at different
places in an APC/BPC model. Of course, there is enough money in the system if we were to
theoretically transition immediately to pay for all the publication that we have to be OA and if
redistributions were put into place. The funds are not, though, distributed evenly throughout the
world’s universities. At the moment this is manifest in an access crisis. In an APC/BPC
model, it will be evident on the supply side, particularly in the humanities disciplines. This
explains the widespread resistance to this model within those fields: if researchers feel the
need to publish in specific venues with specific access requirements and the economics are not in
their favour, they feel the effects directly.

To put this all somewhat differently, though, what is actually happening here is that we have
devised a way of kidding ourselves, to some degree. When justifying expenditure from the library
budget in a supposedly competitive market, we need to conceive of what we are doing under
classical economic incentive theorisations: ‘we are buying this publication as a commodity
object so that our researchers can read it’. We really know, though, that what we are
actually doing is collectively paying for the labour of publishing as a service, which we can
achieve far more easily if we spread the risk. The fact that we have inter-library loan services
and librarians who are committed to spreading knowledge without payment indicates the disjunct
between the idea of paying individually and feeling a grudge at giving the fruit of that purchase
to others who have not paid. In other words, ‘free riders’, deemed problematic in
classical economic theory, are not so amid the strange market contours of the academic library
and scholarly communication communities.

Precedents for consortially funded open access

This is not just theoretical speculation; we have concrete demonstrations that consortial
purchasing for OA is desired by library communities. We also have real evidence that free riders
are no hindrance to such schemes working, so long as a sufficient number of institutions
participate. How else, after all, to explain the continued funding of arXiv or mass
participation in Knowledge Unlatched? ArXiv’s well-known revenue model, for instance, is
one in which ‘Cornell University Library (CUL), the Simons Foundation, and a global
collective of institutional members support ArXiv financially’.2 For the sustainability of arXiv, ‘each member institution pledges a
five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual
fees are set in four tiers from $1,500-$3,000. Cornell’s [the host of arXiv] goal is to
raise $300,000 per year through membership fees generated by approximately 126
institutions’.3 While such a model is entirely
susceptible to free riders, the project notes that ‘arXiv’s sustainability should be
considered a shared investment in a culturally embedded resource that provides unambiguous value
to a global network of science researchers. Any system of voluntary contribution is susceptible
to free-riders, but arXiv is extremely cost-effective, so even modest contributions from
heavy-user institutions will support continued open access for all while providing good
value-for-money when compared with subscription services’.4

This may be all well and good in the case of a heavily used preprint server with concrete
usage metrics known in advance, but what about extending such thinking to full publication and
selection? Moves are afoot. Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg, for instance, have proposed a
model for the humanities under which there would be a central fund, created by ‘an annual
or multi-year payment made by every institution of higher education’, for which
‘[i]nstitutions and scholarly societies come together in partnership to apply […]
through a competitive grant process’.5 While there
are many details of a practical implementation of this precise model that are yet to be decided
(and I might query whether we want more competitive grant processes), the principle is similar.
By collaborating, irrespective of free riders, we gain extraordinary value for money and can
achieve gold OA by spreading risk, as we currently do for subscription publication. All that we
have done is remove the thinking that says we are only willing to pay for a direct, individual
return. That is not what is happening anyway, so let us strip that from our discourse.

Such thinking is not, though, radically new. Hugh Look and Frances Pinter first proposed the
model for Knowledge Unlatched back in 2010. This pilot, which eventually gained just under 300
participating libraries, was based on the reasoning that ‘if, say 1,000 libraries paid
into a fund that “bought” the non-commercial open access rights to a book that
carried, for the sake of the arithmetic, a “getting to first copy” cost of $10,000,
then each library would contribute $10.00. The average monograph today costs approximately
$80.00. This would not only get libraries eight times as many titles online, it would be truly
contributing to making knowledge accessible globally. If, say 5,000 libraries subscribed to the
scheme (although we feel this is unlikely) the cost would be $2.00 a title, representing a 97.5%
reduction on the current print or eBook price.’6

But 2010 was only the start. Sanford G Thatcher notes the close affinity between these
consortial mechanisms and the description furnished by Adrian Johns of 17th-century practice:
‘another option, of increasing importance after 1660, was to publish by subscription
… It involved persuading a number of prosperous individuals to invest enough money in the
proposed publication that the project would be sufficiently capitalized to proceed to
completion’.7, 8 What has changed since then is not the view that the furtherance of the Enlightenment
project is best advanced by the broadest dissemination of research; this remains as key as ever.
It is rather the economic systems to which we are willing to rationalize our commitment.

The Open Library of Humanities

Free riders or not, there is a hunger among the library community for new models, often
not-for-profit, that address the economic and social challenges of gold OA. In the remainder of
this piece, I will describe the steps we are taking with, and the progress towards the launch
of, the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), of which I am a co-founder. Beginning with an Andrew W
Mellon Foundation planning grant, this platform aims to provide a transition to gold OA for
journals in the humanities without any author-facing charges.

The OLH, which I co-direct with Dr Caroline Edwards, has two distinct topological
components.

The first component, the OLH Megajournal, is a multi-disciplinary space for any researcher who
identifies his or her practice as falling within ‘the humanities’. Although not a
‘megajournal’ in the PLOS-ONE sense of ‘peer-review
light’ (in which ‘technical soundness’ becomes the core determinant for
admission), this broad space is an area where the approximately 150 researchers who have pledged
us articles can submit their new work. Of course, we cannot guarantee that all 150 pledges will
be received. We can guarantee that not all of these will pass peer review. The end result,
though, at launch, should be a sizeable tranche of initial material across a wide disciplinary
spread.

The second component is the provision of a space for individual journals to share in our
economy of scale. These existing publications can transfer onto the OLH and we will provide,
through our partnership with Ubiquity Press, a dedicated editorial manager, a hosting platform,
a submission management system, XML typesetting, digital preservation, COPE membership and
CrossRef DOI assignment. Each journal may keep its own branding and autonomy over its
peer-review practices. There are two possible routes for a journal’s inclusion. The first
is the standard admission route. In this route, in collaboration with the academic director, a
proposal is put to the academic and library boards. This must then pass a resolution of quality
control from the academic steering committee and a resolution of budgetary increase from the
library board. This route may only be available at certain times as publication costs are borne
solely by the OLH library consortium. In this mode, there are no costs to journals or authors.
The second route is self-funded quality-assessed admission. In this mode, those journals that
pass a quality-control decision and that have funds to cover their own publication costs for a
period of time (usually three years at approximately US$500 per article), in whole or in part,
may transition to the collective funding pool at the end of this period. This route is subject
to satisfactory quality requirements, along with an internal financial assessment, and is
available solely at the discretion of the academic directors.

It is also well known that books, and particularly the research monograph, form a far more
important component within the humanities ecosystem. To that end, it is vital that the OLH
pursues routes by which these crucial outputs can also be made accessible freely over the web.
In this instance, if we achieve sufficient library participation (see below) and it is desirable
to our library members, we are in discussions with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University
Press, Harvard University Press and Open Book Publishers to work on the cross-subsidy of OA
books.

The economic model that we have assembled for this initiative is one wherein a moderate number
of libraries agree to pay an initial rate of ~US$1000 each (with appropriate banding in some
countries). These libraries are not paying for access to the material. Neither are they paying
for their own researchers to publish. Instead, they are paying to do things a better way and to
have a governance stake in the project. By pooling resources while re-conceiving the
relationship between a not-for-profit, mission-orientated and scholar-led publisher and the
library, an economy of scale is possible that is simply not there under individualist modes of
purchase.9 In return, library members are given a seat on
the library budget board, which makes quarterly decisions on journal admission through an online
platform. Library participants are also prominently acknowledged during the submission process
and, should the institution wish, in a standalone press release on the homepage.

So far, the model is on track to work. While there are challenges ahead – the
anticipated and dreaded year two and three drop-off, for instance – if we and our
participating libraries can ride out the launch period, we should have an ongoing basis for a
transition. With the offer for societies to come aboard our model, we hope also to see direct
cancellations for participating libraries allowing them to support OA without the additional
financial burden inherent in other models for transition. We hope you will join us.10

Competing interests

As openly stated in the article, the author is co-founder of The Library of Humanities.

References

Eve, M P 2014 Some of the material in this article is reworked In: Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316161012 (accessed 13 January 2015).